All that is Solid … is a radical blog that seeks to promote a future beyond capital's social universe. "All that is solid melts into air" (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 'The Communist Manifesto', 1848).

The journal Policy Futures in Education (PFIE) – available online at www.wwwords.co.uk/PFIE – will publish a special issue on the impact of information technology and the Internet on universities: to keep and develop their role as knowledge institutions, how should universities reshape in this new environment? Sub-topics, such as open access to scientific literature and distance learning, have an established track of studies and proposals. However, it has not been common so far to aim at an integrated analysis of how universities will and should change to accommodate the changes brought by cyberspace in their specific role of knowledge user, processor, producer and disseminator.

One topic to be addressed is how the process of learning within universities will change because of the Internet and digital devices. For centuries, college student were educated by listening to their professor read aloud selected books taken from the university library (‘lesson’ comes, in fact, from ‘lectio’, Latin for ‘reading session’). Gutenberg changed that by making books cheaper and therefore more amenable to individual ownership and private reading, but the typical university lesson ended up not changing much anyway. Thanks to technology, we are now experiencing, at least potentially, a Renaissance of learning methods: from e-books to podcasts, from virtual worlds classrooms to streaming, from computer-assisted learning to videogames, the avenues of learning have increased dramatically. Are we heading towards purely technology-mediated learning strategies? Is the old Socratic professor-student direct approach completely obsolete? Doesn’t the wider spectrum of approaches offer the opportunity to educate those students who have always been uncomfortable with the traditional approach? What about the impact on lifelong learning?

A second topic is how research will be affected by the Internet. A major potential impact will be on the way research results will be communicated in the future. The scientific paper as a rhetorical device is increasingly under pressure in favour of more flexible, digitally-enabled forms of communication, mostly based on semantic web technologies. How would the decline of the scientific paper affect science? What about the role of search engines in the future of research? Will the Internet enable new forms of evaluation of scientific results? How would that change the centuries-old mechanism of recognition and promotion within the scientific community? Moreover, the transition towards digital knowledge seem to affect trends towards commercialization of knowledge at universities and knowledge institutions, and the impact those trends have on knowledge generation. Additionally, the Internet seem to be increasing the tension between the growing specialization of research activities and the aspiration towards increased interdisciplinarity.

The third topic regards how should universities use cyberspace to best implement their mission with respect to society. In recent years society has been asking universities to do more than simply – albeit crucially – educate students and produce new academic knowledge. The list of new demands include life-long education, open access to scientific papers and educational resources, and encouragement and support for spin-offs and start-ups. But is that it? Of course not. Public education, at all levels, was born with a clear mandate to educate citizens and to increase social mobility, not simply provide students with marketable skills and bookshelves with new scientific journals. Moreover, in our age the increasingly complex problems that we are facing as society, from global warming to water supplies, from the environment to energy issues, from the challenges (and opportunities) presented by bio-genetics and nanotechnology, don’t call for a renewal of the concept of University as Public Institution? In other words, don’t universities – as institutions as well as through their individual researchers – have a duty to engage more frequently in the public sphere, placing their super skills and knowledge at the service of citizens – and their representatives – to allow them to properly deliberate? If so, how? What would be appropriate and what would, instead, constitute a deontological breach of professorial decorum and integrity? If it is indeed important, shouldn’t universities allow/favour internal organizational changes to better implement such social role? How is that social role linked to freedom of research? Is the growing need of universities in many countries to court potential private investors (or governments) affecting it? If so, what could the consequences be for our societies? Doesn’t the Internet offer extraordinary tools to empower the public sphere presence of universities, professors and students, and to help to reduce social and cultural divides?

The special issue builds upon the COMMUNIA 2010 Conference on University and Cyberspace – Reshaping Knowledge Institutions for the Networked Age, held at Turin, 28-30 June 2010.

A one-day conference organised by Alessandro Carlucci (Royal Holloway, University of London) in association with the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies (School of Advanced Studies, University of London)

Sponsored by the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust, and by the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Royal Holloway, University of London

The main aim of the conference is to share and disseminate the results of recent, specialised research on Gramsci. Significant novelties will be presented by leading experts with the aim of overcoming disciplinary boundaries and helping to reduce the gaps between: a) widespread, conventional understandings of Gramsci and up-to-date specialised research; and b) the work on Gramsci’s writings and biography and the use of Gramsci’s theories for understanding current social, political and cultural issues.

Confirmed contributors: Derek Boothman (SSLMIT, University of Bologna), Craig Brandist (University of Sheffield), Fabio Frosini (University of Urbino), Carl Levy (Goldsmiths, University of London), James Martin (Goldsmiths, University of London), Anne Showstack Sassoon (Birkbeck, University of London), and Peter Thomas (member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism).